XIII
Another memorable presence at Halle is the private lecturer Schleppfuss, who instructs L. and Z. in “The Philosophy of Religion.” Schleppfuss means “drag-foot” and this name, along with several other clues, marks the lecturer as a probable incarnation of the devil. Schleppfuss offers his eager students a rather tenuous definition of spiritual freedom and titillates them with stories that TM took from the inquisitor’s manual Malleus Maleficarum. The point of these stories is to illuminate the psychological disposition of an “integrated” (111/151) culture that did not know the individual freedoms pioneered by the Enlightenment.
Time of composition: February 20(?)–March 8, 1944. Time of narration: Summer 1943. Narrated time: 1903–1905.
| | The numbering is, of course, significant, as Z. himself will point out at the start of the next chapter. |
| | Latin: “authorization to teach.” As a “private lecturer” (Privatdozent), Schleppfuss has the state’s permission to teach courses at the University of Halle but does not hold a formal professorship. |
| forked beard […] splinter-sharp teeth | These serpentine attributes reinforce Schleppfuss’s diabolical nature. |
| | Heaven. However, the term derives from the Greek πῦρ (“fire”) and thus encapsulates Schleppfuss’s intertwining of the diabolical with the divine. |
| | Throughout his lectures, Schleppfuss repeatedly refers to the age of the Inquisition as the “classical epoch,” a term applied in music history to the eighteenth century and to the period which Beethoven would eventually come to transcend. |
| | TM took this epithet from the Malleus Maleficarum, a 1486 treatise on witchcraft by the theologian and inquisitor Henricus Institoris that served as the main source for most of this chapter. |
| | The opposition between a theological conception of freedom and a political one is central to TM’s thought of the 1940s. In the 1945 lecture “Germany and the Germans,” for example, he explicitly faults Luther for having developed the former but not the latter. |
| | A demon who seeks to have sexual intercourse with a sleeping woman; the female equivalent would be a succubus. TM took the following story from the Malleus Maleficarum. |
| flagellum haereticorum fascinariorum | Latin: “the scourge of heretical betwitchers.” Title of a 1458 treatise by the inquisitor Nicolas Jacquier (1410–1472). The term “flagellum” will recur in chapter XXV in conjunction with L.’s syphilitic infection. |
| | Latin: “the illusions of evil spirits.” Title of a treatise by Bishop Bertramus Teuto (ca. 1356–1387). |
| | This derivation of Latin femina (“woman”) from fides (“faith”) and minus (“less”) is etymological humbug, but can also be found in the Malleus Maleficarum. |
| | Another story from the Malleus Maleficarum. |
| | The German uses the antiquated term Schlupfbude, which will recur in XVI, when L. visits the brothel in Leipzig. |
| | Another foreshadowing of Esmeralda/Frau Tolna. |
| | Church Latin: “remedy for a specific disease.” |